“Are you as good with a baseball bat as your brothers?” My mouth was dry, I was full of histamines, crusty infected sores in my brain, on the inside of my skin, all those bites.
“What the fuck?” He started to move away, but I gestured for him to stay where he was. I kept working. Now his broad forehead was a knot, his thoughts visible to me. I stroked paint on canvas, and even through the noise in my head I could read his mind. Here’s what he was thinking: his brothers were in the ACI because they’d bashed a guy’s head in, and why was the neighbor lady bringing up blunt instruments?
His gaze flicked at my west-facing windows. “You should pull your shades.”
“I need light for my work.”
“I don’t like the other men looking up at you,” he said. Oh God, I got that. He was possessive. Oh yes, I could work with that. His eyes were on me now, his lashes long and thick as a child’s. I laid down my paintbrush.
“I don’t want them,” I said.
The tension in his face relaxed. Let me take your pain away. I knew how to do it, the skill came to me as easily as my next breath.
He yanked the cord, lowering the green paper shade. We stood a foot apart in the hot, darkened room. He wore a stained white T-shirt that smelled of sweat and smoke. He kissed me hard, drew blood from my lip. He licked it.
We pulled off each other’s clothes, knelt on the floor by my easel. His rough fingers felt so different from Lenny’s smooth office hands. He entered me and his chest hit against mine over and over, slap slap. I heard waves hitting the boat’s hull, banging against it as it slipped offshore; Lenny and his wife in the cockpit, my jealousy stinging and killing me from the inside, slap slap.
Dominguez came fast. Soon he sat up. Afternoon light blazed through the cracks between the shade and window frame, illuminating his body, and I saw flecks of gold leaf, dropped from my subjects’ halos and wings, caught among the whorls of his black chest hair. The sight made my eyes sting. I know what is holy. I know that love is a sacrament, and I felt it for Lenny. I was going to kill someone, but for love, for the only reason that mattered.
“You going to keep painting me?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “You want me to?”
He gave a shy smile. “Yeah.”
“There might be something I want you to do for me in return.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t you know?” I whispered. I stared into his eyes, willing him to figure it out. I had mentioned the baseball bat. He was going to break into Lenny’s house, pretend to steal TVs, murder his wife. Lenny would be back at work and the kids would heading to summer camp next week, after they returned from the Cape.
“Hurt someone,” he said.
“Yeah.” I was chilled by how easily he said it.
“Hurt them bad?”
“Yeah.”
“For you,” he said.
“Yes, for me.” I trailed my fingers through his chest hair. My fingertips twinkled with gold, and I wrote my name on his skin but I felt a little sick.
“You won’t look at the other men?”
“Out there?” I gestured toward the window.
“Any other men.”
“I won’t look at them,” I said.
He nodded, pulled my face to his, and kissed me so hard I bit my own lip. The pain shocked me. When he left I ate a pint of ice cream and made myself puke. Bulimia is a pretty word, sounds so much nicer than what it is. I’d been doing it for so many years I didn’t even think about it, just did it. In that instant the swarm stopped. Everything was quiet, peaceful inside, just the drip of slow poison, the leaky faucet of jealousy that never really went away.
*
The days passed. As I worked on Dominguez’s portrait, a form emerged: not a guardian angel at all but Lucifer, holding a gilded baseball bat dripping blood. The image gave me nightmares; my own work scared me as it never had before. I always painted what I wanted to see in someone, not what was really there. Do you think all those politicians deserved halos? But with Dominguez I couldn’t disguise anything. For the first time in maybe forever, or at least since childhood, I was painting what was true, not what was wanted.
I avoided Dominguez. The more I painted him, the more I began to blame him for my own thoughts of murder. If not for what I knew about him and his brothers, I would never have thought of killing Lenny’s wife. That wasn’t me. I’m not a killer, I know what is holy, love is a sacrament that shouldn’t end in death.